Page 38 of Hostile

He exhaled slowly through his nose. “Fine. Miss Hale.” The way he said it made it sound like the most patient form of argument I’d ever heard. “Do you want to tell me what you actually want here? Because the position you’ve built—this isn’t a passive investment. This is a siege. And I think you know that, and I think you’ve known it for six years, and I’d like to understand what the endgame looks like from where you’re standing.”

The hallway was very quiet.

What do I want? A question I could answer in my sleep—had answered, in my head, about ten thousand times over the past decade. I wanted the Aldridge name to know what it felt like to lose something it couldn’t buy back. I wanted the company that had employed my parents and then discarded them without a second thought to understand that the people they overlooked had longer memories than they had counted on. I wanted ten years of grief, loss, and rebuilding to mean something beyond the walls of my chest.

I wanted justice.

What I said was, “I want what any active investor wants. A say in how my investment is managed.”

He looked at me with those blue eyes that had always seen through whatever expression I put on, reaching for the thing beneath. Stop that, I thought. You don’t get to do that anymore.

“You’ve never been good at lying,” he said quietly. “Especially to me.”

The anger hit me before I could stop it—not the cold, controlled kind I’d been running on for years, but the hot, real kind, the kind with teeth. “That’s interesting, coming from you.”

“I know you think⁠—”

“I know, Wyatt. I don’t think. I was there. I heard you.” My voice stayed level with the effort of someone holding something heavy at arm’s length. “I heard you deny it in that hallway. I watched your face when you saw me standing there, and I know exactly what I saw.”

“You saw what it looked like,” he said. “Not what it was.”

“And what was it?”

He held my gaze. Steady. Unblinking. The way he’d always held it when he meant what he was about to say with every part of himself. “Something I’ve been trying to explain to you for ten years. Something I should have found a way to say a long time ago.”

My pulse was doing something completely unacceptable.

“Save it for someone who wants to hear it.” I reached for the boardroom door handle. “We should get back inside.”

“Megan.”

I stopped with my hand on the door. Didn’t turn around.

“I’m not going to fight you on this.” His voice came from just behind my shoulder, close enough that I felt the warmth of it. “I’m not going to lawyer up and play hardball and pretend I don’t know exactly what this is. You want a war, but I’m not giving you one.” I feel him intentionally pause for emphasis. “But I’m also not disappearing. Not this time.”

Not this time.

He reached past me to push the door open, his hand briefly covering mine on the handle before I could pull away. Not aggressive. Not calculated. Just a half-second of contact, warm through the thin fabric of my sleeve, that neither of us had planned and neither of us acknowledged.

I felt it in my spine.

I felt it, and I didn’t move. For one completely unscheduled moment, we stood in a corporate hallway with his hand over mine on a door handle, the board waiting twelve feet away, and ten years of everything pressing in from every direction. Neither of us said a word about it.

My grip on the door handle grew stronger. He released his hold. My hand still felt warm from his touch. I dismissed it and pushed the door open. We entered as two professionals—no longer friends or lovers, just two individuals focused on how the business functioned and made a profit.

Last time, the traitorous part of my brain reminded me, he went with Blair into that hallway, and you never saw him come back.

The board looked between us with the interested, careful expressions of people who had correctly assessed that something significant had just happened in the hallway and were too well-bred to say so.

“Shall we continue?” I said pleasantly, then took my seat.

The meeting wrapped up by noon. I was the first one out the door, coat already on, portfolio under my arm, moving through the lobby with the practiced efficiency of a woman who had somewhere more important to be even when she didn’t.

I made it all the way to the sidewalk.

“Miss Hale.” His voice came from just behind me, and the amusement in it was so familiar that it made something in my chest clench. “You forgot something.”

I turned. He was holding my phone. I must have left it on the conference table—the first time in ten years I’d walked out of a room without it, which was infuriating on approximately three different levels.